A/N: A short drabble which will soon spawn others. The idea crept in at me and just won't leave me alone, so in spite of other things needing to get done (not the least of which finishing my fic The Tongue of a Vampire/Dark Side of the Moon) I sat down and wrote this one. Not all of them will be H/C, but most of them probably will be. All will be cuddly and sappy and probably too sweet for those with a sugar sensitivity.

In some sense, this is a tag to 1 x 4Phantom Traveler in which Sam makes fun of a terrified Dean for humming Metallica, to which he in turn claims "it calms me down." While I'll freely admit that sometimes I personally can't fall asleep without a good Disturbed or Led Zeppelin album playing in the background—and hence know what Dean's on about— this just begged to be explored. So this is just a series of scenes establishing Dean in happy, comfortable, amorous, content, excited, pleased, etc. moments and associating them with Metallica songs, until by some Pavlovian weirdness, Metallica induces these good vibrations. Maybe a few Wee!chesters for good measure, but mostly Teen!chesters. In "Bleeding Me," Dean should be 18 and Sam should be 14, if I got my release date for Load right.

Today, Dean had been dragged under frozen Lake Michigan water and chewed on by an overgrown guppy he had since forgotten the name of—though that admittedly could have been because of the concussion—and, having escaped its clutches and broken the surface, he discovered with heart-crushing panic that he was alone. Dread had gripped him, then, in case Dad or Sam were hurt, too, and he swam frantically toward the shore to get back to the car and get another silver blade, for his had been lost in the struggle. But luck hadn't been with him and he chose the long way on accident, giving Monstro plenty of time to find and catch him again. He had been dragged to the bottom, his ears popping and his lungs filling with murky water while he was shaken back and forth in the monster's jaws. A different kind of dread had gripped him then, a primal fear of death, and then there was nothing.

The next thing he knew—and, by virtue of having a next-thing-he-knew, Dean deduced, rightly, as it turned out, that his sorry ass had to be rescued, which didn't help his ego—he was coughing his guts up along with half of Lake Michigan, and someone was hitting his back way harder than was really necessary, but in all the commotion of regaining consciousness only one voice stood out to him, and it had turned the bitching up to eleven:

No air was going in: all his energy was expended getting the water out. He couldn't answer, much less comply with his brother's request to breathe.

Now his father's voice, barking out stern orders, the terrifying voice that Dean knew meant Dad was just as scared as Sam was and was trying not to show it: "Come on, son, you gotta breathe. Breathe in, Dean, come on. Breathe now! Damnit, Dean!"

Reality was still gray and weird, but he was pretty sure that was when his day went from merely suck to sucks out loud, because as he continued only to cough and wheeze out, gasping like a landed fish unable to take in oxygen, his father started performing CPR.

The gasp of mortification and just plain gross! was enough to kickstart his lungs, and he began inhaling air like it was going out of style, his chest going up and down like a bellows, though ragged and punctuated by coughs. He was pretty sure that water was still draining out his nose. He puked again, as if for emphasis, or just to get the last of it out.

That was when he realized he was bleeding. A lot. Because Dad didn't tell him to get up and hustle back to the car, or even start carrying him there. No, he did first aid right there, and was using the angry voice with Sam that usually made Sam want to fight him, but Sam was so scared himself that he didn't so much as roll his eyes, just helped and did whatever needed to be done. Good, Sammy, thank you, Dean wanted to say, but he was sure it only came out as a croaked version of approximately half of Sam's name.

He was also very cold, and that didn't help anything. And now that the adrenaline of fighting and killing a monster was fading, pain bled into his brain and sat on it like a Boeing 747. If he concentrated—which he tried not to do, he tried to let go, slide back into oblivion, but his whining baby brother wouldn't hear of it—he felt the pain sharper along his legs and left torso, where the fishy had gotten into him good, and from which he was still bleeding profusely. The teeth of Moby Dick were no less sharp for being roughly the size of his fingers. He was pretty sure that he felt his dad actually pull a couple of teeth out of him.

Now he was seated in the car, bundled like a mummy in every first aid bandage they owned, and over that, wrapped in two sleeping bags, and over that, Sam's really friggen lanky long arms. Not only did this remind him that at 14 Sam was depressingly almost as tall as him, but this was a massively inappropriate chick-flick moment as well. Dean's latest purchase, Metallica's new album Load, was in the tape deck, and it was just not as good as the Black Album. On the plus side, however, Dad wasn't singing along to this one. Yet. Give him time. Once he learned the lyrics, it was all over. Why Dean had to be cursed with two of the most tone-deaf family members in existence was beyond him.

Things took a slight turn for the better when he heard his father mentioning that his wounds weren't worth a trip to the hospital, but that his efforts against the—whatever it was—earned him a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a slice of pie, if he wanted it, which Dad stopped in at a diner to retrieve, leaving the boys in the car. The black metal box was blissfully warm, and as much as his little brother was the biggest girl ever to plague cool older brothers, he was warm, too. And the way he tucked in up against Dean, forcing him against the door of the car, octopus-clingy and snoring gently, was—well, it was kinda okay. You know, if you liked that sort of thing. Dad had left the keys in the ignition, and the last song on side one of the album—"The Bleeding of Me" he thought it was called—whatever, he was still learning the names of the songs—was totally putting him to sleep. He didn't remember taking any pain killers, but then he didn't remember what he had for breakfast or what state they were in, so he was pretty sure at some point someone might have forced a couple pills and a sip of Gatorade down his throat without him noticing because of how pain-free and hazy he felt. He had a slight desire to listen to Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," but, no, Load was fine for now.

A/N: Thanks for reading! And for those who care, I really do promise to saddle up on The Tongue of a Vampire/The Dark Side of the Moon after this week's out (read: after this essay I'm currently avoiding will be turned in), and will hopefully post something by the end of this weekend.

If you have any suggestions of happy moments in Dean's life you would like to see up to 1 x 4, please let me know and I'll try to fit a Metallica song to them!

The author would like to thank you for your continued support. Your review has been posted.